


The Lucas Curative

by jujubiest



Series: The Lucas Compendium [13]
Category: Forever (TV)
Genre: Ableism, Angst, Assisted Suicide, Hospitalization, M/M, Paralysis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-22
Updated: 2016-03-22
Packaged: 2018-05-28 10:41:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6325795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jujubiest/pseuds/jujubiest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All their plans have gone wrong, and now Adam is trapped in his own mind and body, indefinitely, with only one way out. Lucas is furious, and grieving, and unsure he will be able to do what Adam needs him to do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lucas Curative

**Author's Note:**

> There is only one more part to the main story of this series, but I may go back and write some missing scenes as well, just for fun. If there's a scene mentioned in this series that you'd like to see written out, leave it in the comments!

_Lucas_

 

Lucas peeks his head into the hospital room and immediately feels a lump forming in his throat at the sight that greets him.

_How did it go so wrong?_

Adam is on his back in the narrow bed and hooked up to numerous machines, his eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling. His face is unusually pale, and he looks…Lucas tries not to think of it, but too many days spent in the company of corpses make the comparison inevitable.

He forces himself to remain calm as he steps inside the room, a vase full of flowers held in one hand. They’re daisies, bright yellow, from a florist cart a block up the street. He thought Adam would prefer those to anything he might buy in the hospital gift shop, but looking at him now Lucas wonders if the flowers will even register…if Adam even knows he’s here.

He places the flowers carefully on the windowsill, making sure they’re not in danger of falling. Then he pulls a chair up to the side of the hospital bed, as close as he can reasonably get, and folds his limbs into it, reaching out a hand to grasp one of Adam’s where it lies, too pale and still, against the blanket.

His hand is warm, which sends a surge of unaccountable relief through Lucas. He squeezes gently, brushes his thumb over the bony knuckles, focuses on how Adam feels rather than how he looks and tells himself _he’s alive, he’s alive, that’s all that matters._

“I waited by the river for you all night,” he says softly, when he can trust himself to speak. “When I finally realized you weren’t going to show, I kind of…lost it. I was terrified. I went to find you…I saw the ambulance driving away, so I followed it here.” He pauses, pushing down the wave of anger that threatens to choke him when he thinks of Henry Morgan. Adam doesn’t need to see that. It won’t do him any good.

 _I could kill him,_ he thinks, giving the anger form in his mind, just to get past it. _I could kill him for doing this to you, and enjoy it._

“Why didn’t you _tell_ me what you were planning?” He says finally. “With the dagger, and the gun? You said Henry would use it to find you. You didn’t tell me he could—that he might have—”

He has to stop and take several deep breaths before he’s calm enough to continue. When he does, his voice is soft and pleading.

“Didn’t you trust me, Adam? Did you think I would try to stop you?”

Adam, of course, gives no response. He keeps staring up at the ceiling. Lucas doesn’t even know if he can hear him at all, but he keeps talking anyway.

“I _would_ have tried to stop you,” he confesses. “But not for the reasons you think.” He leans in, both his hands holding Adam’s now, willing him to understand, hoping he can actually hear what Lucas is saying.

“I wouldn’t have cared, if you had tried to kill him. I wouldn’t have cared if you had _succeeded_. I made my choice, Adam. I chose you. I _love_ you. But…how could you risk _yourself_ like that?”

He reaches up with a tentative hand, smooths down an errant strand of dark hair.

“What if it had worked? What if I had lost you…for good this time? Do you know what that would have done to me? Do you even _care_?”

He takes a deep, shuddering breath.

“I’m sorry,” he says gently, after a moment. “I’m sorry. This is not what I came here to say. I just…I was so afraid I had lost you, Adam. I don’t know what I would do if that happened.”

He falls silent for several minutes, trying to think about how to say this next part. The room is eerily quiet, the thick walls and heavy wooden door blocking out any noise from the outside. He knows he can’t stay long; he doesn’t want Henry to find him here. It would be easy enough to explain; after all, Henry still believes Lucas to be blissfully ignorant, dating the fabrication known as Ethan Durant. But Lucas isn’t sure he could see him right now without wanting to wrap both hands around his neck and squeeze until he turned blue and stopped moving. Just the thought makes the palms of his hands itch.

When did he become this violent, vengeful person? It unsettles him, but he shakes it off. What’s important now is Adam. He will deal with Henry later.

“I’ve been thinking,” he says finally. “If I…if I were to…kill you.” He barely manages to whisper the last two words, and they hurt on their way out.

“If I were to do that, you would come back fine, right? Whatever Henry did to you…it would be fixed? And we could go away together, like we planned.”

He looks hesitantly at the machinery. It would be easy to unhook Adam from the monitors, remove the breathing apparatus. Place a pillow over his face…it would be quick…

He strokes those knuckles with his thumb again, feeling nauseous at his own train of thought. This is what he really _hates_ Henry for. Almost anything else, he could have forgiven. But not this: not forcing him to make this choice.

“I don’t think I can do it,” he whispers. “I want nothing more than to help you, to get you _out_ of here, but…but I just keep thinking. What if I do it, and you don’t come back this time? Or what if I do it, and you come back but you’re not okay, and you drown in the river, and just get stuck in an endless cycle of death? I have nightmares about it.” He shudders at the memory.

“I feel like I’m failing you. I feel like maybe you’re lying there listening to this, and hating me for being so weak. But I…I can’t do it, Adam. I can’t bring myself to kill you. Not when I don’t know enough about how this works. Not when I don’t know whether—or how—you’ll come back.”

He releases the hand he’s holding, arranges it carefully against the blanket. He stands up and puts the chair back in its place, then leans over Adam and plants a lingering kiss on his forehead.

“But don’t worry,” he whispers. “I don’t plan to leave you alone in here, like this, forever. I’ll come and visit you every day. And I will find out _everything_ I can about this…thing you and Henry share. When I’m sure, _really_ sure, that I won’t hurt you…I’ll do it. I’ll make myself do it. I promise.”

Promise made, he stands and leaves the room without turning back. He doesn’t see the single tear that slips from the corner of Adam’s eye when he goes.

* * *

 

_Adam_

 

Adam sees, hears, and feels everything when he’s awake. He does get sleep, of a sort, but it’s rare and not very long; his body apparently doesn’t need much of it, now that he’s completely immobile. There’s a nurse that comes in to stretch his limbs and clean him up twice a day—and he mentally grates his teeth at the indignity of it, being handled like a child’s toy—but other than that he lies still and memorizes the ceiling.

He has visitors, surprisingly. Henry comes to see him once a week, and he is oddly kind considering he did this to him. He always brings a book with him and reads it aloud, the soft cadences of his accent soothing to Adam’s skittish, restless mind. He lets the words wash over him, and more often than not falls asleep to the sound of whatever poetry Henry has chosen for that week’s selection.

Abraham comes as well, which Adam definitely did not expect. The first time, it’s to tell him he’s a bastard for what he’s done to Henry, and Abigail. Adam knows it wouldn’t mean a thing if he told him—either of them—that he hadn’t meant for Abigail to die, had in fact wanted exactly the opposite. They already know, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was his fault. She was a casualty in his quest for Henry, and her death is something that will never be forgiven.

The second time Abraham visits, however, he glares at Adam for a full minute before sighing and collapsing into the only chair in the room.

“I’m too old for this kind of anger,” he says, sounding tired. “I know I should hate you for the things you’ve done. My god, you’re a monster. But I gotta wonder if maybe you were driven to it, or to some of it anyway. I dunno. Maybe I’ve just lived with Henry for too long, but I don’t believe evil exists in a vacuum, without a reason or a source. You’re the way you are for a reason, just like Henry’s the way he is for a reason. And maybe if you’d had a little more of what Henry had, you’d’ve been a better man. So. Let me tell you about the person who saved him.”

And he does. He tells Adam all about Abigail Morgan, from the stories that are simply hearsay—the way Abigail and Henry met, their time together in the war, their early days of marriage—to the things he remembers firsthand. He describes the shape of her smile, the kindness in her eyes that could light to laughter at the slightest provocation, the quiet happiness in which she lived for most of her life. He tells Adam about Abigail and Henry helping him with his homework, getting him piano lessons, introducing themselves to their Jewish neighbors and making a valiant—if sometimes disastrous—effort to make sure Abe was always connected to his heritage.

He comes back week after week, on different days than those when Henry visited—Adam suspects that Henry didn’t know about these trips at all—and tells the life story of Abigail, Henry, and Abe, all the way to its sad, bitter conclusion. And in his mind, Adam laughs, and cries, and regrets…because now, more than ever, he wishes he could go back and save Abigail Morgan’s life, make himself not be the man who took her from the world, however accidentally.

When Abe is done, he doesn’t stop visiting. The week after he tells the story of how Abigail left, he brings the book Adam once gave him, and talks animatedly and at length about all the things he’s found out about his birth parents and their family—including, Adam notes with some amusement, the fact that he is in actual fact related to Henry by blood as well as by simple familial feeling.

He thanks Adam for the book, his voice husky with emotion, before leaving. And Adam thinks that will be it for Abe’s visits: he’s said his piece about Abigail’s death. He’s made sure Adam knows exactly what he took from the world. And he’s thanked Adam for the gift he gave him; there is nothing else to be addressed between them.

But the very next week he’s back with some new thing, and again the next, and the next, and the next. Each time he brings some new, strange object, and each one has a story attached to it.

Adam listens to it all, filing these things away for the long hours he spends alone in between visitors, something to stave off the constant, near-maddening boredom.

The visit he looks forward to the least, ironically, is Lucas’s.

Because Lucas keeps his promise: he comes to visit Adam every single day after work and stays as long as the nurses will allow it. He brings books, like Henry does, but of a vastly different flavor: science fiction, fantasy, mystery. He brings comics as well, and occasionally a movie. He pulls the chair as close to the hospital bed as he can and curls up in it, making himself impossibly small for someone so tall and lanky. He raises Adam’s bed so that he can see the screen and holds his hand on the blanket between them, injecting the films with his exclamations and random bits of trivia just as he used to when they were curled up together on the couch in his apartment.

Some of the movies are quite interesting; others are terrible. But Lucas is there either way, and that makes it wonderful.

And also terribly, terribly painful.

He longs to be able to reach out and run a hand through Lucas’s hair, to contract his fingers and return the gentle pressure on Lucas’s hand, to give him a smile…anything, anything at all. Any sign to let Lucas know he’s here.

Contrary to what Lucas may think, Adam doesn’t at all begrudge him his inability to do the one thing that would free Adam from this bed. One of the side effects, Adam has found, of loving Lucas is a strange and uncanny ability to imagine how he must feel in any given situation. And so he knows that were the roles reversed, he couldn’t do it either. He couldn’t stop Lucas’s heart, steal his breath, watch the life fade from his eyes. Not if he didn’t know what would happen, and possibly not even if he did know. It just isn’t in him, apparently, to take the life of someone he loved. And if it isn’t in _him,_ it certainly isn’t in Lucas.

Sometimes, Lucas brings nothing with him, just sits with his chin leaning on the edge of the bed and talks to Adam. He tells him about work, about nights out with his handful of friends, about the latest thing he has managed to glean about immortality from Henry.

It’s wonderful, and terrible, and driving Adam out of his mind the longer it all goes on. Days stretch into weeks, and weeks into months. Every day Adam half-hopes, half-dreads that Lucas will come again, and every day he is overjoyed and disappointed to see that he does.

He had thought perhaps Lucas’s visits would become less frequent as time went on, that he would grieve and then slowly begin to move on with his life, leave Adam and the mess he’s made of himself behind.

But he doesn’t. Not after one year, or two. Not after five. Adam begins to fear that Lucas will spend his entire life—his finite life with a finite end—wasting away by his bedside in this ugly little room. And he doesn’t want that for Lucas, not at all.

He stops longing for a way to give Lucas a sign that he’s here, and starts longing for a way to tell him to stop, to go back to his life and leave Adam to the fate he has so sorely earned.

But all he can do is watch, and listen, and pray that Lucas will find someone new someday, and finally go on living his life.

* * *

 

_Henry_

 

Henry is a man of many disparate drives, and at the moment two of them are locked in a vicious stalemate.

On the one hand, his sense of justice and responsibility dictate that Adam, the immortal who has tormented him and murdered countless innocents, remain safely confined to a hospital bed where he cannot hurt anyone else—for all eternity if possible.

On the other hand, his sense of mercy—and, if he is honest with himself, romance—is mortally offended by the sight of Lucas Wahl coming, day after day, to sit without hope by the bedside of someone he loves who would never, ever be able to love him back.

He discovered the visits years ago, and felt immediately guilty for forgetting Lucas’s romantic attachment to “Ethan Durant.” Apparently their relationship had continued long after Henry’s last confrontation with Adam about it, and Lucas had clearly gotten very attached indeed.

Henry wants—has wanted for _years_ now—to tell Lucas the truth about “Ethan,” so that he can move on and begin to heal. But he can’t. He can’t risk revealing his own secret, and furthermore he can’t take the risk that Lucas will try to free Adam once he knows the truth.

Love, after all, drives the best of men to do stupid things.

So at first he had watched, hoping that Lucas might move on in his own time without any help from Henry. But he was increasingly dismayed, as months and then years passed with no sign of Lucas’s affection flagging.

It seems that Lucas truly loved this Ethan character Adam had cooked up. Henry cursed the man in his mind, not for the first time. As many horrible things as he had done, this was quite possibly the cruelest of the lot.

And that is what finally settled it for him. He could not allow Lucas to waste his entire life on a man who not only didn’t love him, but who didn’t even exist. He would have to tell Lucas. He just had to figure out the best way to approach him about it.

In the end, he decides it would be best to do it with Jo’s help and corroboration.

They corner Lucas in the lab on a Monday evening after almost all the morgue staff have gone home, deciding it provides an easy and discreet clean-up if they must resort to a demonstration. Abraham is waiting with the car and a change of clothes by the Hudson, just in case.

But as it turns out, Lucas already knows.

He knows _everything._ Not just about Adam, either. He knows about Henry, has known for years.

He knows things about Adam that Henry didn’t even know.

All Henry can do at this revelation is stare at him in horror, because _how_ can Lucas know and still feel the way he feels?

“You don’t have to understand it, doc,” is all Lucas says, his voice equal parts sad and defiant. “I’m not sure you could unless you were me.”

“Lucas,” he returns severely. “You know he can never be let free. He’s too dangerous. You have to promise me.”

A light sparks in Lucas’s eyes at that, anger perhaps. But he nods immediately.

“I know. Don’t you think I’ve thought about it? Killing the man you love isn’t easy to do, even if you know they will come back. If I haven’t done it in ten years, I’m not gonna do it. One of the first things I did when I started going to visit him was beg him to forgive me for being too weak to set him free.”

Henry is shaken, not only by the realization that Adam might have escaped at any time in the last decade, but also by the notion that he has helped put Lucas into this awful position.

“Then…you intend to simply live out your life by his sickbed, knowing he will never get better or be other than he is right now?”

Lucas shrugs, an overly casual gesture that strikes Henry as odd, though he can’t tell why.

“I love him,” he says, as though it’s that simple. “Nothing is going to change that. Not even time.”

Henry can only close his eyes in the face of that, unable to bear the naked honesty in Lucas’s face. He hates himself, deeply, for his part in this.

“I’m so sorry, Lucas,” he says softly.

Lucas doesn’t answer, but the look he gives Henry when he opens his eyes again is laced with a touch of forgiveness, an anger he hadn’t even realized was there fading for the first time in a decade.

Jo and Henry don’t speak on the way home that night, both their minds full of the memory of Lucas, their Lucas, unabashedly declaring his love for a monster.

* * *

Henry walks down the hallway more slowly than usual, reluctant for this visit to a degree he hasn’t experienced since the day he’d checked Adam in as a patient.

He doesn’t know how he is going to look at the man in that bed, knowing what he knows now. He doesn’t know how he’s going to live with himself, not for Adam’s sake, but for Lucas’s.

As it turns out, he will never have to know.

When he reaches the room, he pushes open the heavy door and stands stock still on the threshold, staring in horror.

The bed is empty, the room deserted. Only a single sheet of paper remains on the bedside table, with a brief message scrawled in a familiar hand.

_Henry,_

_Adam is with me. It took me ten years to find out the truth from you and build up the courage to do it, but I finally did. Thank you. Please don’t try to follow us._ _I’m sorry I lied to you yesterday, but I knew there was nothing I could say that would make you understand._

_I’m not saying Adam is a good man, but he’s a better one than you know. You can believe that or not, but it’s the truth. As long as he has me, he’ll be different. Maybe even after that, who knows?_

_Anyway, he’s agreed that the two of you can pick this up in fifty years or so if you want, after I’m gone. I hope you’ll reconsider, but until then I wish you all the best._

_Sincerely,_

_Lucas_

_PS: Seriously, don’t try to find us. Stay in New York with Jo and Abe. They love you, and they, like me, won’t be around forever._


End file.
